Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Bad expiry dates on incoming news articles
Message-ID: <1990Apr9.154953.24429@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <766@barsoom.nhh.no>
Date: Mon, 9 Apr 90 15:49:53 GMT

In article <766@barsoom.nhh.no> tih@barsoom.nhh.no (Tom Ivar Helbekkmo) writes:
>So, what I'm wondering is, is this just a bad joke or is it a bug in
>that site's news software?  Obviously, this date has an internal
>representation of -1L...

It's a bit hard to tell for sure, but probably what is happening is that
the expiry date was originally something silly, and a B News site along
the way has tried to rewrite it into something sensible and silently
failed, with getdate() returning -1 and B News faithfully converting that
to an ASCII date.  C News does not rewrite headers unnecessarily, so we
actually see some of the expiry dates people put in -- things like "when
my subscription does".
-- 
Apollo @ 8yrs: one small step.|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
Space station @ 8yrs:        .| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu